


Stomach Bugs

by arboreal_overlords



Series: Dance Card Multiverse [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon compliant (kinda), Everyone deserves to have a meaningful roadtrip with Martin, Gen, M/M, Martin Blackwood has two drinks and immediately spills his biggest secret, Martin unlocks 30 percent of Tim's tragic backstory, S1-era shenanigans, some Tim/Sasha if you squint, they lied about getting food poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24616615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboreal_overlords/pseuds/arboreal_overlords
Summary: Stakeouts, falsely-accused kebabs, and the origin of the Archival Assistant Code of Absentia before Jane Prentiss ruined it all.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Tim Stoker
Series: Dance Card Multiverse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2080608
Comments: 26
Kudos: 215





	Stomach Bugs

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I have *checks notes* three unfinished WIPs I really need to complete, and an Agnes/Gertrude fic that I was supposed to finish last week, but then the second fluff ep dropped and I’m back to Sad Tim Stoker Hours 24/7, so here you go: the origin story of how Tim ended up as Martin’s confidante and friend in early S1. Thank you to Jack Beckwith and Imogen Cassidy for writing such amazing fluff episodes, which I shamelessly used as prompts here. 
> 
> FULL CREDIT to kelasparmak on Tumblr for the suggestion that 'stomach bugs' became a running excuse for the archival assistants, which is basically the plot backbone of this fic. 
> 
> This is set nebulously in a timeline that begins right before Sasha and Tim’s s1 flashback conversation in MAG 162 (which might be pre-MAG1?) all the way to the first Fluff episode (so a few weeks after MAG 22). 
> 
> Content warnings for two characters briefly making out while drunk, Martin’s canon-typical trauma post-Prentiss, some Stranger-adjacent horror, and a brief reference to a fatal car crash.

The Gonzalez statement was, in Jon’s words, “unconfirmed but troublingly similar to Statement 0092302.”

“More weird trash, then,” Tim said, flipping through the file.

“Literally, I’m afraid,” Jon replied wryly. Tim chuckled, because he was trying to encourage Jon out of his shell. Jon was still pushing the Professional Automaton thing like he hadn’t used to spend most coffee breaks showing Tim cat pictures back when they were both working in Research.

Alyssa Gonzalez’s statement was certainly unnerving; she owned and operated a small pub in the center of Guildford, and had received several reports from her workers that someone was noticeably adding bags of trash into their bins on the nights before collection. One night while she was closing down the pub herself, she saw one such bag, bulging but surprisingly light on the top of the bin, clearly the wrong brand from the kind that they used. She cut it open to find that it was entirely full of human hair, different kinds mixed together in a tangle of cut strands. She brought it up with the town hairdresser, who swore she knew nothing about it, and then installed security cameras in at the back of the pub. Nothing was caught on tape, but they found another bag stuffed full of Polaroid photos of the backs of people’s heads, thousands of different pictures of unidentified portraits of subjects, all in the same plain studio, sitting facing away from the camera. Finally, the worker who originally reported the bags had gone missing, and Alyssa had come to the Institute to make a statement after arguing with the police that this wasn’t a simple case of a teenage runaway.

“Spooky,” Tim said, just to be difficult. “What do you want me to do?”

Jon sighed. “It’s probably nothing, but Alyssa Gonzalez’s trash days are on Friday mornings. Can you go down and corroborate the statement with her staff and maybe watch the pub for a few hours? See if you can spot any—” he paused for a moment and his voice dipped low in derision-- “manifestations.”

Normally Tim would be thrilled at being sent out of the office on a stakeout, but he wasn’t particularly keen to sacrifice a Thursday night to wait around in Guildford, of all places. “You know, Martin should really be doing this,” he protested. “He’s the one who interviewed Woodward, the trash collector in the Walthamstow case.”

Jon grimaced, as he always did when Martin came up in conversation. “Well, he can go with you, I suppose,” he said in concession.“Just don’t let him do anything too important.”

* * *

Martin offered to drive, but Tim had seen Martin’s absolute death trap of a sedan lurking in the side streets off the Institute and decided that he wanted to live to see thirty-five.

“Let’s just take the train,” he offered.. “We can go over notes, and we’ll just expense the tickets to the Institute anyway.”

“Car’s faster,” Martin argued. “Besides, we can’t have a proper stakeout without a car. What are we going to do, just lurk in an alleyway like creepers?”

Tim resigned himself to a fiery demise on the A3, but while Martin was indeed a speed demon of a driver, he was also surprisingly adept. It’s not like Tim was expecting him to a nervous wreck, but it was hard to connect the Martin who rolled his eyes at a florid man in a Hummer who flipped them off while yelling mutedly through his closed window with the Martin who winced every time Jon made a pointed glance at his interview notes.

“Wow,” Tim said, ducking to avoid the fuzzy ornament hanging from Martin’s car mirror as Martin changed three lanes in order to avoid a swerving BMW. “Where’d you learn to drive?”

“Oh, I delivered pizzas when I was younger,” Martin said, still focused on the road. 

Tim waited for Martin to follow up with another detail, like _‘ . . . and then I was recruited as a getaway driver for a bank job,’_ but apparently that was all of the mysterious Martin Blackwood origin story that he was unlocking today. 

That was the other reason Tim wanted to take the train; Tim had worked with Martin for a few months now and still knew almost nothing about him. On a train, they could sit back and talk, and Tim could try and loosen Martin up, see what he was like away from the office. Martin veered into a left-hand merge and Tim fiddled with the radio, breathing steadily through his nose.

Unlike Sasha, Martin had never crossed paths with Tim while working at the Institute before and hadn’t shown up to a single Institute holiday party or happy hour. Tim had seen him in the hallways sometimes— Martin was pretty hard to miss— but it wasn’t until they both started working in the Archives and Martin became Jon’s bewildered scapegoat that Tim got to know him.

“He’s like the human version of a golden retriever,” Tim had initially vented to Sasha during after-work drinks. “He’s just so relentlessly _eager._ I would have strangled Jon five times over if I were him.”

“Some people are just nice, Tim,” Sasha had replied.

“I’m nice!” Tim protested. “You’re nice! Martin’s _too_ nice. Sometimes I just want to yell at him to show a little backbone.”

Sasha spluttered into her gin and tonic. “Was that an _Indiana Jones_ reference? That’s a drink penalty, Stoker, the next round is on you.”

Regardless, Tim’s initial impression of Martin was that he was shy but talkative, loved novelty mugs, and was deeply unsuited for this job. Tim once saw him frantically reviewing the _Chicago Manual of Style_ after Jon had audibly yelled at him in his office about cross-referencing; Tim pretended like he had just gotten back from a coffee break to spare him further embarrassment. It wasn’t that Martin was unintelligent— Tim had worked with dozens of guys in publishing that skated through uni on their parent’s wealth and collected impressive-looking credentials without learning anything. Martin just seemed beleaguered, like he was constantly treading water just to stay afloat in the day-to-day office tedium of the Institute.

And yeah, he and Sasha probably weren’t the most approachable of coworkers; during their first few weeks in Archives, Sasha was still reacting to Elias’ professional snub with cheerful but relentless concentration, and Tim was compensating with cheerful but relentless insubordination. Martin was left desperately trying to please a cranky and self-conscious boss, and was probably a little intimidated by the two of them. Sasha and Tim took turns inviting him out for drinks every week, but Martin never accepted. 

So this trip was Tim turning over a new leaf. What better opportunity to bond, after all, than sitting in a car for hours on end on a questionably-legal stakeout?

* * *

As it turned out, stakeouts were wildly uninteresting. So far, they had identified the bar, which was called The Tipsy Pigeon—

“That’s an epically awful name for a bar,” Tim said.

“I like it,” Martin said loyally.

— interviewed the bartender on shift, who confirmed that the missing girl, one Erin Buckley, was bright and friendly and unlikely to simply run away. She had disappeared while working the closing shift on an empty Tuesday night a year and a half ago. The bartender gave them a copy of Erin’s initial MISSING poster, which Alyssa Gonzalez still kept in stacks under the bar. Erin was tall with long hair dyed into a bright blue ombre and a friendly smile.

After that, they stopped for a kebab and parked the car in a side-alley with a clear view of the pub’s bins. In the resulting three hours, Tim was no closer to knowing anything about Martin beside his love of some Terry Pratchett book, the plot of which he had just finished describing in granular detail.

“So why the paranormal?” Tim interrupted, just as Martin was gearing up to discuss the sequel to this book, of which there were apparently many.

Martin looked startled. “What?”

“I mean, I came to the Institute from publishing, and Sasha came from academia, but parapsychology is the real deal. You must have realized pretty early on that you were interested in spooky stuff.”

Martin tensed in his seat and looked out the window. “Oh! I mean, I just found it interesting. Shouldn’t we be focusing on, like, the back of the pub?”

Tim scoffed. “Seriously? That’s it? You weren’t, like, abducted by aliens in lower sixth?”

“Oh come on, you _know_ we don’t cover alien abductions in Institute statements,” Martin said snappishly. It was probably the closest Martin ever got to saying ‘fuck off.’

“Fine, fine,” Tim said putting his hands up. “Keep your secrets.” He’d obviously started from the wrong angle.To be fair, it’s not like Tim was keen on whipping out his own paranormal origin story. Maybe Martin had his own side project, something that he came to the institute to explain.

“Okay, favorite movie,” Tim said, changing tactics.

Martin sighed. “I don’t know Tim, probably Lord of the Rings? Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“I’m just trying to get to know you,” Tim replied cheerfully. “Who is Martin Blackwood? Come on, you’re not just three cups of tea in a trenchcoat, I want to know more about you.”

“You know plenty about me,” Martin said. His voice was still weirdly high-pitched. “We’ve been working together for months. It’s not like I know what your, I don’t know, astrological sign or favorite movie is.”

“Yes you do,” Tim argued. “You got me that Inigo Montoya mug for my birthday three weeks ago. The only reason Sasha and I know when your birthday _is_ is that Sasha snuck a look at your personnel file.”

“What?” Martin squawked, before visibly trying to recover from the shock. “I mean, is she even allowed to do that?”

“Probably not,” Tim said cheerfully. “So, favorite food?”

Martin was still fidgeting nervously in his seat. “Um, ice cream? Listen, Tim, did Sasha say anything to you about the rest of my file?”

“Just that you’re a Christmas baby! That’s very cute. Unless you don’t celebrate Christmas, or even if you just didn’t like the holidays, then I guess it’d be a pain. Might be a challenge to find an ice cream place open in December, but I’m sure we can swing something. ”

“I don’t really do the holidays,” Martin said. “I mean, my mom and I used to get a tree and all that, but then she got sick and we haven’t bothered.”

Tim had about fifteen more followup questions about _that_ , but he also possessed some social tact and saw that Martin seemed uncomfortable with any line of conversation that involved his own personal details.He let their conversation drift into an idle debate of which British celebrities had probably experienced paranormal encounters, and Martin immediately relaxed. In a rare position of playing the skeptic, Martin pointed out that rich and famous people rarely found themselves in the kind of liminal spaces that lent itself to the supernatural. Tim countered that celebrities often got access to weird places that were restricted to the general public.

“I think Noel Fielding came in to give a statement a few years back,” Tim said absently.

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah,” Tim said, yawning. “Might have just been a random white goth guy, though.”

It has started to rain outside, a cold, miserable-looking mist in the November chill. Martin turned on his windshield wipers and reluctantly turned his engine back on after Tim had visibly shivered several times.

Tim blamed the rain and the rapidly growing evening dusk on the fact that he didn’t notice the woman approaching the car on the driver's side until she rapped on the window with one bony hand.

Martin yelped in surprise, immediately jolting away from the window and half over the car console.

“For god’s sake, Martin,” Tim huffed, unbuckling his seat belt, “it’s an old lady, she’s not going to murder you.” He leaned over Martin to roll down the window on the other side of the sedan.

“Hi,” Tim said, giving the rueful and charming smile that usually caused women over sixty to want to adopt him. “Sorry about that, you gave my friend a bit of a scare.”

“What on earth are you two doing idling out here?” The woman demanded. “Don’t you know that there’vebeen people who go missing around this alley?” She was wearing one of those translucent plastic rain bonnets that made her look like a shepherdess from Mars. Her demeanor said ‘I think you are possibly kidnappers,’ and Tim didn’t feel like doing the whole paranormal investigator song and dance, so he improvised. He was half-sprawled over Martin anyway.

“Ah, didn’t mean to cause any alarm,” he said, still cheerful but also a little embarrassed. “My boyfriend and I were trying to figure out where we wanted to grab drinks, and we got a little carried away. I don’t suppose you have any local recommendations?”

The woman looked back at Tim, unimpressed but no longer outwardly suspicious. “The bar sixty feet in front of you is probably a good start,” she said drily, and then turned to walk away.

Tim sighed and moved back into the passenger seat. “Friendly people here,” he said, before realizing that Martin was frowning at him. “What, what did I do?”

“Why didn’t you just say that we were from the Magnus Institute?” Martin asked.

“Yeah, that would have gone over well. Excuse me, ma'am, you don’t need to worry about us, we’re paranormal investigators.” Tim sighed. “Trust me, you’re going to get a lot further doing follow-up interviews if you don’t tell people that you work for the Magnus Institute. People _are_ willing to talk to old college buddies looking for their friends, or insurance investigators, or—” Tim gestured between them,” — two nice young men going out for a date.”

Martin scoffed. “Come on, she was never going to buy that we were on a date.”

Tim paused and considered his options. “Why?” He asked cautiously.

“I mean, you’re _you_ ,” Martin began, looking wildly uncomfortable.

— ah, so it was Reason B, then.

Tim nodded, talking over him before he could finish the sentence. “Yep, yep, top-notch analysis there, Martin. Quick question: do you not realize how gorgeous you are?”

Martin turned bright red. “I didn’t mean—I wasn’t fishing for compliments—”

“Nope, we’re having this conversation,” Tim interrupted. “You do know about that guy who came in with the statement about falling off a construction crane and said that he wanted to ‘climb you like a tree?’ Jon kicked him out before he could leave his number.”

Martin, if possible, turned an even deeper red. “That guy was literally insane, Tim.”

“He had some issues with vertigo and workplace harassment, sure, but still exhibited great taste in men,” Tim insisted, steamrolling ahead. “The Slack for the Accounting department also has a running discussion around the fact that you give great hugs. Elsie claims that it’s the only thing that makes dealing with our budget forms worth it, and everyone else is wildly jealous.”

Martin looked bewildered and slightly pleased. “Oh, she does? That’s nice. Wait, how did you even get on the Accounting Slack?”

“Oh, I’m in all of them,” Tim said airily. “Seriously though, Martin, I would be _honored_ to be caughtmaking out in a car with you—” 

“Wait, Tim, look,” Martin said, sitting up suddenly in his seat.

“Nice try, Martin,” Tim scoffed. “But you’re not going to distract me that easily—”

“—No, Tim, seriously, look at that van!” Martin pointed. Tim turned his head, and his attention immediately shifted, all humor on his face fading.

There was indeed a white van idling by the back of the pub’s trash bins. It was medium-sized, too small to be an industrial truck and too large to be a private vehicle. There were navy panels on the side of the van that advertised something, but it was too dark to see.

“Should I turn my headlights on, do you think?” Martin asked quietly.

“No,” Tim said.

They said in total silence as the sliding door on the other side of the truck opened, and a large figure emerged, his shadow cast in grotesque scale on the wall of the building. Tim was hit with a vague feeling of _wrong_ that made his skin crawl and his head ring with music that wasn’t playing.

Martin leaned forward and had his hand on the door handle when Tim threw an arm across his chest, holding him in place. “Don’t get out of the car,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made Martin ease his hard away from the door handle.

The distorted shadow rippled farther across the back of the building, and they could hear the tinkling rustle of plastic on plastic coupled with the displacement of glass bottles. The shadow moved backward, opening the sliding van door again, before the headlights flickered and the van growled back into motion, quietly easing down the back road until it vanished from sight.

Martin and Tim both waited several minutes until they could no longer hear or see any glimpse of the van’s headlights before bounding out of the car. Martin was a smidge taller than Tim but Tim was still faster and broke ahead of him towards the lumpy pile of trash bags that sat on top of and around the industrial metal bins of the pub. There were dozens of them, heaped in asymmetric configurations and buzzing with the faint hum of flies. Tim looked around in frustration and really hoped that this night wasn’t going to end with him sifting through garbage with his bare hands.

“It’s that one,” Martin said behind him, and gestured at a deflated trash bag that lingered on the edge of one of the bins.

Tim looked over to him for clarification. “A full trash bag would have made more noise when that— whoever— there it,” Martin said. “Also, I worked in a lot of restaurants when I was younger. I know what suspicious trash looks like.”

Tim edged toward the bin and grabbed the edge of the bag, pulling it towards him as it slithered over like a potentially deadly eel. Rather than fighting with the tight knot at the top, he ripped open the side of the plastic and stuck his hand inside, despite Martin’s sharp concerned noise at the gesture. It was the worst possible way to find out what was inside— Tim knew he was being an idiot— but he was driven by a sudden urge to know, and didn’t care that this was the oldest horror movie trope in the game.

Instead of knives or teeth or other potentially horrifying material, Tim’s hand finally brushed against a single smooth, bendy object. He grabbed it and pulled it from the bag, turning it over and stepping back towards the street light.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Tim said quietly, tilting his hand so that Martin could see the small rectangular piece of paper clutched in his hand. It was a polaroid of the back of someone’s head, someone sitting with their back to the camera in a spartan studio, dressed with nondescript clothing and with long hair dyed slightly grown-out bright blue ombre.

* * *

By the time that they had returned back inside to the Tipsy Pigeon, it was far too late to drive back into London and they slumped over the bar, exhausted and still more than a little rattled.

Against Tim’s strenuous objections, Martin gave the polaroid to Alyssa Gonzalez, who confirmed that it was indeed the back of Erin Buckley’s head. “I’m sorry it’s not more,” Martin said earnestly.

“Thank you,” Alyssa said, wiping her face. “It’s definitely more than the cops gave me. I might be able to use this to badger them into re-opening her case. Drinks are on me tonight, just tell Shayla that you’re a friend of the house.”

“Sure,” Tim said. “Hey, any recommendations for a place around here we might crash?“

Alyssa gestured up at the ceiling with her head. “There’s a B&B that operates above the pub,” she said. “It’s a quiet season for them, so the rates should be pretty low. I’ll put in a word for you.” 

’Thanks,” Tim replied, not bothering with his charm offensive smile because he could read a room. He was still vibrating with the last dregs of some weird adrenaline, the combination of seeing _something_ after years of second-guessing his memories of Danny’s death as trauma hallucinations or manifestations of guilt. He wondered what would have happened if Martin wasn’t there with him, if Tim would have just marched up to that van and attacked despite the consequences.

A short, stocky woman who was likely Shayla slid drinks toward them once Alyssa had left. Martin got a cider and Tim a pint of local lager, in a casual display of what Tim assumed was the psychic power of a small-town bartender.

“We did good,’ Tim said, raising his glass in a toast.

Martin scoffed and half-heartedly gestured with his glass. “We got no answers, Tim.” He took a healthy sip of his cider. “We might have made things worse.”

Tim laughed. “‘We might have made things worse’ is pretty much the unofficial Institute mantra. But hey, we didn’t get killed or arrested, and we have enough new information to make Jon happy. For Jon’s definition of happy, anyway.”

Martin slumped on his barstool, cupping his chin in one hand morosely. “He’s going to be furious that I gave that polaroid away, isn’t he.”

“Yeah, that’s all on you, my friend” Tim said, patting his shoulder. “I am not taking the heat for that one.” 

“It’s just— what were we going to _do_ with it?” Martin said. “File it away in a folder with a bunch of papers with a stamp on it that says ‘probably a hoax’ and let the last piece of evidence that something happed to Erin Buckley just grow dust in an archive?”

“Well, yeah,” Tim admitted. “But I was thinking more along the lines of showing Jon, making a copy, and then mailing the original back to Alyssa from London.”

“Right,” Martin said, sighing. “Right, that makes sense, I guess.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re a bad archivist, Martin,” Tim said consolingly. “It just means that you’re a good person.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Look, if I were someone coming into the Institute,” Tim began earnestly, jumping over the narrative gap of Danny’s death that he wasn’t going to touch after a thousand drinks, “if I’d experienced something weird, I’d want you to take my statement. You see people as whole people, not just, y’know, little bundles of information. That’s not easy in this job.”

Martin looked down at the bar, blushing. It was incredibly charming. Tim wanted to make him blush again.

Martin opened his mouth, and Tim prepared for him to issue a bashful denial or a comment about Tim’s own general empathy and charm. (In his defense, Tim was two beers in and always a sucker for words of affirmation.)

“I lied on my CV,” Martin said instead.

Tim choked on his lager. “Wait, _what_?”

Martin didn’t meet his eyes as Tim coughed, barely swallowing his drink, and then turned to stare at him. “Oh,” Tim said hoarsely, genuinely lost for words for the first time in a long time. “Seriously?”

“I never even went to university,” Martin said, his words coming out in a rush. “It wasn’t hard to fake it when I first started, because I could just google things; it would take me longer, but I’d get them done! But then I got transferred and Jon immediately knew there was something wrong and I just feel like I’m being watched all the time, that someone is going to figure it out.”

“Why’d you lie?” Tim asked.

“I . . . well,I needed this job,” Martin said defensively.“And I wasn’t going to be hired anywhere in London with the credentials I had, so I just . . . added some? My mum has medical bills—”

Tim raised his hand. “Martin, you don’t have to defend yourself to me. Seriously. I get it.”

They sat quietly together for a moment; Martin was still breathing heavily like the confession had required physical exertion.

“So,” Tim finally said. “You really don’t care about the paranormal at all, then.”

“Well I do _now_!” Martin responded shrilly, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Now that I’m up to my neck in— body-snatchers and haunted coffins and bug people! I had to learn how to translate Latin and — bonus— a vampire killer died of lung cancer in the middle of the office last week! All for a mediocre salary and medical insurance that definitely doesn’t cover ghosts.”

Tim burst out laughing, and after a moment Martin joined him, both of them bent towards each other in helpless hysterics. “I’m sorry,” Tim said unsteadily, wiping his eyes “but you really have the worst fucking luck.”

Martin groaned and thunked his forehead onto the top of the bar, his shoulders still shaking slightly in silent laughter. “It could be worse,” he said, his voice slightly muffled. “If Jon actually believed in parapsychology he would probably want to _talk_ to me about it. I’ve started to stress-read the Wikipedia page at night when I get anxious.”

“Excuse me, Shayla,” Tim called politely. “We would love another round.”

Several drinks and increasingly bad imitations of Elias later, Tim turned on his barstool and pointed at Martin like a slightly tipsy detective. “Wait,” he said. “If you didn’t go to uni or get your masters, how old were you when you started working at the Institute? You’ve been working there even longer than I have.”

Martin shrugged. “Nine . . . teen I think? Maybe twenty?”

Tim gaped at him. “You’re _kidding_ me.” 

“I mean, I had my growth spurt when I was pretty young,” Martin continued, ignoring Tim’s silent meltdown. “I could pretty much pass as an adult by the time I was sixteen, I just told everyone that I have a baby face, which—is true.”

“When I told that lady that we were making out in your car,” Tim said, still sputtering, “I want to be clear that I thought we were the same age. Oh my god, am I a cradle-robber now?”

“I’m twenty-eight, Tim,” Martin said, rolling his eyes “It’s not really a scandal, is it?”

“Yeah, but it’s the principle of the thing!” Tim proclaimed grandly, gesturing with his beer. “I can’t have anyone at work questioning my ethics.”

Martin pushed his glasses up his nose, which was starting to go quite flushed. “Tim, in the five months we’ve been in archives, you’ve seduced, like, five cops for information.”

“Yeah,” Tim said. “ _Ethically_.”

Martin laughed. “ Okay, you keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

* * *

The B&B room that Alyssa had set them up with was small but cozy, and thankfully devoid of any hideous floral patterns. There was a tiny bathroom set to the left as they walked in, and a large canopy bed standing in the middle of the room and surrounded by the kind of worn antique furniture common to all B&B’s.

“Oh, it’s nice,” Martin said, with more earnest appreciation than the place really warranted, but Tim dropped his bag near the front door and let it slide.

There was only one bed, but Tim could summon the energy to feel particularly bothered about it; after chasing a possible eldritch van, a bed was hardly the weirdest thing he and Martin had shared today.

Martin sat on the bed and started slowly untying his shoes while Tim puttered into the bathroom to fill two water glasses. When Tim emerged from the bathroom, Martin was still fussily picking at his shoelaces with an air of petulant befuddlement that was incredibly cute. “Here,” Tim said.

Martin looked up at the glass in Tim’s hand. “What?”

Tim put the glass down next to Martin on the side table instead, automatically grabbing a coaster because his childhood was full of water rings on wood furniture that his mother mock-despaired over. “Drink this,” he said firmly. “Your head’ll probably hurt like hell in the morning, otherwise. Did you bring a charging cord in your backpack? We should plug in our phones.”

Martin looked up at him inscrutably, which was weird because usually, his face was incredibly easy to read. Maybe Tim was drunker then he thought.

“Did you not bring a charger?” Tim asked. “I think I packed an extra. What kind of phone do you have?”

“Can I kiss you?” Martin asked suddenly, his words rushing together. It took a moment for Tim to register what Martin had even said.

Tim, who prided himself at generally being an unflappable and confident person, found himself staring at Martin while his brain experienced a train collision and attempted to do advanced trigonometry at the same time.

Martin flushed and started stammering. “Oh god Tim, I’m sorry, that was so incredibly stupid, I didn’t mean—”

Tim managed to upend most of his glass of water on his shoes while darting forward to kiss Martin softly, cutting off whatever string of apologies and self-recriminations Martin had planned. He slid the hand that wasn’t holding the glass up Martin’s cheek, tucking a few errant curls behind his ear before cupping his jaw.

“Wait,” Tim said, pulling away and laughing, “so _all that_ today and it’s water and proper electronics management that do it for you? Are you seriously—”

“—shut up, Tim,” Martin said decisively, and then kissed him again. After a few sprawling reaches, Tim managed to set down his now-mostly empty water glass on the side table without looking and then wrapped his arms around Martin’s neck. For a few minutes, Tim just reveled in it, grinning against Martin’s mouth and feeling him smile in return, ducking to press an open-mouth kiss in the space under Martin’s ear just to see how he would react. Favorably, it turns out.

The next time Tim pulled away, it was more slowly, and he pressed his forehead against Martin’s. “Hi,” he said.

Martin smiled. “Hi.”

“We should probably get some sleep,” Tim said. “Um, not— well, you know what I mean.”

Martin looked at Tim solemnly. “Tim,” he said earnestly, laying a hand on the side of his face. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were smooth.”

Tim pushed him backward and stood up, rolling his eyes as Martin giggled. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were _nice_ ,” he grumbled, walking over to the other side of the bed and pulling off his shoes.

They both stripped down to their boxers and tee-shirts silently on either side of the bed, sliding under the covers and lying quietly in the dark. 

“Tim?” Martin said hesitantly, turning towards him.

“Yeah?”

Martin paused. “Back in the alley,” he said quietly. “How did you know to stay in the car?”

Tim sighed and shifted slightly towards Martin, so they were at least touching shoulder to shoulder. “I’ll tell you later,” he said, which even then he knew was probably a lie.

* * *

Tim woke up slowly the next morning, blinking against the slats of light that shone through the window shade. There was a pleasant, warm weight pressing down on his left side, and a head that was pillowed against his chest. His left arm was totally numb, and there was a tangle of curly hair brushing his chin. It was nice.

“Hi,” Tim said, giving Martin’s head a light pat.

“Hi,” Martin replied, rubbing his face muzzily in Tim’s tee shirt. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Nah, I’m up,” Tim mumbled unconvincingly.

Martin hummed against Tim’s collarbone. “Wha’ time isssit?”

Tim started and groped for his mobile, which was covered in notifications. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he groaned. “It’s ten o’clock.” Ten o’clock and they were still in _Guildford_ of all places, an hour drive from Chelsea even without morning traffic.

“What?” Martin hissed, bolting up on the bed.“Oh Christ, we’re going to be sacked.”

“I genuinely think Jon might kill us both first,” Tim said, scrambling to find his trousers while still scrolling through his mobile home screen “He called me _twelve times_.”

Martin paused in his own scramble to look offended. “He didn’t call me.”

“Trust me, you got off easy,” Tim said, since _‘I don’t think Jon looked up your mobile number and I was already in his contacts’_ seemed a little harsh. “His last text message was a combination of literal quotations from the employee handbook on punctuality and reminders that a stakeout doesn’t constitute an all-nighter, which is the closest thing we’re going to get to outright concern. How fast do you think you can get us to the Institute?“

Martin winced. “Probably an hour and a half, even if I drive like a madman. We won’t get in until lunch.” He looked genuinely nervous, and Tim felt a stab of pity. Tim would get a proper bollocking, but Jon might actually threaten to fire Martin; he’d certainly never been shy about insulting Martin’s work ethic or competency within Elias’ hearing range.

“Okay, so we lie,” he said placatingly, putting a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Jon’s not going to believe that we were like, captured by a trash monster, but we can say something else.”

Martin face drained of all blood, falling into an expression of undisguised panic and horror as he suddenly remembered the events of the previous evening. “Tim,” he said, deadly serious. “You cannot tell _anyone_ about my CV.”

“I’m not going to!” Tim said quickly. “What, you think I’d rat on you to Elias? Or even to Jon?”

“You can’t even tell Sasha.”

“I won’t!” Tim protested. “Seriously. I am a closed vault.” He mimed zipping his mouth shut.“But we need some more of that power of deception you have going on.”

* * *

In the end, they agreed on food poisoning, since they had receipts from lunch and both Jon and Elias seemed like the type to move the conversation away from graphic descriptions of uncontrollable bodily functions as quickly as possible. Martin, of course, felt awful about wrongfully accusing the kebab place, and wrote them several anonymous five-star reviews on Yelp to allay his conscience.

Sasha didn’t buy it for a minute. _You have a stomach of iron_ , she texted Tim immediately. _I once saw you drink four jaegerbombs and eat a bacon roll that had been sitting out in the sun for hours. I want details the minute you get into work on Monday._

“Sasha’s onto us,” Tim said, sliding into the passenger seat of Martin’s car where it was idling in the street in front of the bar.

Tim had insisted on paying for the B&B, especially after Martin’s comment about his mother’s hospital bills. “I got a big life insurance payout in my twenties when my parents died,” Tim had said, knowing it would quell Martin’s protests immediately. Martin looked at him with huge, solemn eyes,but didn’t ask any questions. Tim was startled to realize that he wouldn’t mind if Martin did— he still wasn’t going to talk about Danny, but he knew so much about Martin now that it didn’t seem like Martin would look at him differently if Tim stopped being the workplace class clown for five minutes.

“Well that was only a matter of time,” Martin sighed, shifting gears on his ancient sedan with an audible crank. “Sasha’s smarter than the rest of us put together.”

“Yeah,” Tim said fondly. He looked out the passenger window while Martin fought his gear shift and peered at the rearview mirror. “It was a five-car pileup on the M25,” he added. Martin threw the car into park, lurching them into stillness, and turned to stare at him in shock.

“Sorry,” Tim said, as they idled on the side of a mildly busy side road in the Guildford town square. “Bad timing. I just meant— that’s why I don’t really drive.”

“Christ, Tim, you should have said something!” Martin said shrilly.

Tim shrugged. “I’m not worried,” he said. “You’re a good driver. Seriously though, where the hell were you delivering those pizzas?”

Martin told the story about lying to the local pizza place that he was sixteen and learning to drive by trial and error until he could get a real license while driving with near-mechanical precision three miles below the speed limit their entire trip into London. He pulled up carefully in front of Tim’s apartment building and sat for a moment quietly as Tim got out of the car, planning to lean down and talk to Martin through the window.

Instead, as Tim straightened and adjusted his bag, Martin exited, crossed around the front of the car, and enveloped him in a tight hug.

It’s not as if Tim lacks company; he has Sasha, and Jon (when Tim can drag him out of the Institute) and a few friends from publishing who stuck around through his erratic career change and even more erratic behavior after Danny’s death. He has tons of casual acquaintances in his phone who are always ready to go for a coffee or a drink or sex, if Tim felt so inclined, thought the last one happened less frequently than his workplace reputation would suggest.

Still, he can’t remember the last time that he felt this comforted. Tim tucked his face into the juncture of Martin’s neck and shoulder and wrapped his arms around his waist. It was a good hug.

“Accounting is going to have a fit,” he said into Martin’s shirt collar.

Martin laughed silently, and Tim could feel it down the line of his body. “I still don’t believe that’s a thing,” he said. “But if it is, let’em talk.”

* * *

After Sasha had been thoroughly debriefed of their Thursday night escapades, claiming a ‘stomach bug’ became code for miscellaneous absences among the archival assistants.

Two weeks later, Sasha had a bit of a wild night with her friends from uni and ended up crashing at her friend’s place all the way over in Balham. _I have a ‘stomach bug,’_ she texted Martin and Tim.

Jon made a few distressed hums at Sasha’s email, but Martin nodded quickly. “She looked bad yesterday,” he said earnestly. “I told her she should go home, but she seemed pretty dedicated to the Herne followup.”

Tim wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or concerned that Martin was a far better liar than he was. It was at least partially to do with the fact that Jon underestimated him.

Time went on, and they celebrated Martin’s birthday (his _twenty-ninth birthday,_ Tim knew, and smirked at Martin through the whole birthday song) by going out to ice cream. Tim managed to find a place still open in December that wasn’t too far afield from the Institute since Jon made noise about losing work hours before the long holiday weekend. Jon actually came with them, which was surprising, and monologued the entire time about emulsifiers, which wasn’t. Martin looked surprisingly happy, though, so Tim chalked the whole thing up to a win. He went Christmas shopping with Sasha to help her pick out gifts for her four chaotic nephews and paused in front of a tree topper decorated to look like the Tower of Sauron.

“Oh, absolutely not,” Sasha laughed, catching him staring at it. “Tim, if you buy that then you can never call me a nerd again.”

“No, not for me,” Tim insisted. “For Martin. I’m thinking next year we should smuggle a tree into the break room.”

“A live tree? In the Archives?” Sasha scoffed. “Somewhere, Elias just died a little inside.”Tim mockingly toasted his hot chocolate into the sky and turned his attention back to debating the educational merits of two different Lego sets with Sasha.

In January, Tim took off work for Danny’s birthday and told Jon that he was sick. _Stomach problems_ , he texted Martin and Sasha, because he’d rather keep up his reputation as Institute Flirt than have them show up with soup and find Tim crying and surrounded by earmarked history books and home videos. 

Sasha came over after work anyway, because she knew about Danny and could put two and two together. “You take the same day off every year,” she said gently after Tim had cried on her shoulder for most of the evening. “We’re not going to run away if you stop being Mr. Sunshine all the time, Tim.”

Suffice to say, when Martin disappeared at the beginning of February and texted Jon about a stomach bug, Tim and Sasha raised eyebrows at each other and said nothing, even when Martin’s absence stretched on for a few days. Tim wasn’t jealous; if anything, he was a little relieved. They had never really talked about that kiss in Guildford. Martin didn’t seem like the type who went in for casual hookups without developing feelings and Tim had already struggled through one post-hookup awkward period with Sasha when he was back in Research (albeit one where _he_ was the one with the feelings, but it stood). Besides, Martin deserved to have a spicy, work-skipping fling! It might help him unwind a bit from Jon’s snapping.

Elias looked. . . odd about it. Not quite as perturbed as when Tim and Martin had arrived back at work the first time, or even in that damn budget meeting where Tim had aggressively pushed the ‘food poisoning’ story. He seemed unsettled but more curious than mad. “Yes,” he said. “It does seem that Martin is once again indisposed.”

“You know Martin,” Tim said placatingly. “He’s got a delicate system.” Martin was built like a rugby player who decided to go into tea-making instead of sport, but everyone nodded and continued on their way. Jon muttered something about a concerning lack of gastrointestinal health among his assistants.

After a week, Tim texted Martin. _How’s the ‘stomach bug,’ going, Romeo?_

Martin responded minutes later. _Still going_ , it read simply. 

Martin was by no means a voluble texter— he had clearly never been part of a lively group chat, and his texts tended to be cheerful but utilitarian, often punctuated by a fully typed-out smiley face that always made a vein in Jon’s forehead throb. Something about this text struck Tim as off, though, especially in contrast to Martin’s alarmed scramble in Guildford at the prospect of being late to a single day of work.

“Should we be checking in on Martin, d’you think?” He asked Sasha casually as they researched a particularly odd report about a carnivorous shrubbery.

Sasha shrugged, her focus still on what looked like a digitized sixteenth-century book on flora and fauna in England. “Poor guy probably just needed a break. Maybe this is his way of quitting.”

Tim frowned at his computer screen. “What, you think he just _ghosted_ us?”

“Seriously, Tim?”

“I swear, the pun was unintentional that time,” Tim said, peering around the computer monitor at him. “I dunno, it just doesn’t seem like him.”

Sasha hummed. “How much do we really know about Martin, though?” She asked distractedly, flipping through the electronic pages of the manuscript.

* * *

Four days later, Martin rushed into the Institute looking unwashed and ashen and gave a statement about his imprisonment by Jane Prentiss. Jon seemed uncharacteristically shaken as he sat across the table from Martin, listening to him haltingly work his way through an account of his exploration of Carlos Vittery’s building and the subsequent barricade in his own flat.

Tim, meanwhile, was playing with his pen restlessly just outside the room, while Sasha leaned on the wall next to him. They exchanged a few looks of horrified comprehension as they listened to Martin’s story, both of them replaying their idle inquiries to each other about Martin’s absence and their assurance that his ‘stomach bug’ was yet another riff of what Tim had unofficially crowned the “Archival Assistant Code of Absentia.”

Sasha looked uncharacteristically angry at Jon after months of determined collegiality and warmth. Tim was too, distantly, but was more concentrated on his own self-recriminations. “You thought I was _what_?” Martin had asked him when he had first stumbled into the Institute, and Tim felt physically ill. Not only was it incredibly obvious, in retrospect, that Martin would never just skip work for two weeks without a serious problem, but also Tim had _done this before_ , had sat around with his head in the sand while someone he cared about was attacked by monsters. It would have been better if Martin were angry at any of them, but he just looked tired.

While Martin retreated to his new airtight room in the Archives, Tim and Sasha went to Martin’s apartment to get some clothes and things for him. The idea of returning to the proverbial scene of the crime caused him to go a bit green and wobbly.

“Don’t go alone,” Jon said severely, and Tim would’ve snapped at him for the sudden concern and paranoia in his tone after two weeks of nonchalant ignorance if he wasn’t beating himself up for the same thing.

He and Sasha took the Northern line quietly together, hyper-alert to the other passengers and flinching whenever a rat raced in the periphery of their vision in Charing Cross station. Martin lived at the end of the line, a short walk from High Barnet; his apartment was on the top floor of a dilapidated brick building. They ascended the stairs carefully, looking in every corner for worms.

Martin’s flat was still strewn with two weeks worth of trash and dirty laundry; towels were clustered around the front door and windows, some still crusted with silvery residue. There didn’t seem to be any air conditioning, and with the windows firmly shut the air was uncomfortably warm and smelled like dirt or something woodsy and rotting. It was a grim place, even before Martin had converted it into an eldritch attack shelter.

Martin had written a shaky list of a few things he might need, and so Tim and Sasha split up for speed. Tim ducked into the bathroom and grabbed a row of prescription pill containers without looking at the labels. He tried not to think about how invasive it would feel to have coworkers comb through his own flat, and Tim wasn’t even committing professional fraud.

Martin’s bookshelf was the only thing in his flat that seemed to echo his personality. There were a few textbooks on Parapsychology that Martin must have bought when reading the Wikipedia wasn’t helping ally his anxiety. The rest were beat-up paperbacks, brightly decorated genre novels, and some poetry compilations that Tim vaguely recognized.

“Tim?” Sasha called from the down the hall. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” he responded and grabbed every book by Terry Pratchett he could see in ahaphazard pile. “Picking up some books.”

Sasha emerged with a small duffel bulging with clothes. “Let’s just get out of here,” she said, looking around and shivering. “God, poor Martin, this place looks like a bunker.”

* * *

Martins’ new room in the Institute wasn’t much better: it was a dim, windowless vault bracketed by bookshelves of grimy banker’s boxes. Martin was slumped on a small cot shoved against one wall, looking hollowed out. His eyes darted up at Tim when he entered the room, hyperaware even in the midst of his exhaustion. “Hi Tim,” he said quietly.

Tim set the two duffels down softly next to the cot. Sasha had stayed behind to talk to Jon, a gimlet look still in her eye. Sasha had long since outstripped Tim as Jon’s favorite assistant, and she probably wouldn’t have to push too hard to get him to ease off Martin. In Tim’s experience, no one berated Jon more harshly than Jon.

“I didn’t remember the title of the Pratchett book you were talking about in Guildford,” Tim said sheepishly, unloading the books in a pile onto one end of Martin’s cot. “So I kind of . . . . got them all?”

For a moment Martin looked pathetically overwhelmed at this small act of kindness. “Oh, thanks, Tim,” he said quietly, before clearing his throat. “I actually, um, reread them all while I was shut in. I didn’t really have anything else to do”

“Right,” Tim said, feeling foolish. “You should try to get some sleep,” he added. “You look terrible.”

Martin huffed. “Yeah, thanks.” He rubbed at his eyes with closed fists. “I can’t— I keep on waking up thinking that I hear something crawling towards me? Just little noises, sounds of squirming, but I just wake up, and I can’t tell if I really heard them or I dreamed them.”

Tim thought for a moment and clambered down onto the cold stone floor, sitting with his back against the cot. “Alright,” he said. “They’re silver and black, right?”

“Yeah?”

Tim adjusted his back against the biting metal frame of the cot. “So you go to sleep and I’ll keep an eye out for them.”

Martin stopped midway through his movement to lie down. “You really don’t have to do this, Tim. I know you and Sasha feel bad—”

“—come on, I want to.” Tim insisted. “I’ll hang out down here, and if I see a single worm I’ll do the whole ‘ _you shall not pas_ s’ bit and stomp on it.”

Martin was quiet, and for a moment Tim thought he’d fallen asleep already.

“Gandalf actually doesn’t say ‘you shall not pass’ in the books,” Martin finally said, his voice muffled from the pillow. “They added it for the movie.”

“Nerd,” Tim said nudging Martin’s thigh with the back of his head. “Well, sleep tight!Don’t let the bedbugs—”

“ _Oh my god_ , Tim,” Martin hissed, and Tim grinned into the dim, empty space of the archives.

The logical voice in Tim’s brain that sometimes sounded weirdly like Jon pointed out that developing feelings for _both_ of his coworkers was probably going to end in spectacular disaster. Tim decided that this was a problem for Future Tim, and set himself to the task of surveying for worms while Martin’s breathing evened out behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> Me, writing this story: finally, a fun S1-era story where nothing really bad happens to Tim!  
> Me, finishing this fic: oh god why is this still so retroactively sad. 
> 
> Anyway, as always feel free to vent your feelings with me about any and all combinations of the Tim/Martin/Sasha dynamic in the comments or on Tumblr @ arborealoverlords 
> 
> I would also highly encourage you to donate to your local bail funds/ mutual aid funds if you can!


End file.
